E-mail is one of the most frequently used forms of communication in present day society. While e-mail has been used in private network environments for decades, the popularity of e-mail has skyrocketed over the past decade with the widespread use of the Internet. In fact, it can be said that the use of e-mail has become ubiquitous in many environments. That is, it is heavily used and relied upon in business, personal, and governmental environments for convenient, inexpensive, and rapid communications.
With the explosion in the use of the Internet, the problem of handling large numbers of e-mails has increased. That is, the filing of large numbers of e-mails by an e-mail recipient can be a very time-consuming and error-prone activity.
One approach to addressing this problem is to allow users to file e-mails in folders. As used herein, a “folder” is a storage location, typically identified by an icon, name, or other identifier, which can store a number of related e-mails. Folders are also typically allowed to enclose subfolders. This approach can be found, for example, in the Microsoft Outlook® e-mail system.
Studies have not determined any single comprehensive folder filing strategy for e-mails. Some e-mail recipients prefer to file their e-mail according to the sender's name. This has the advantage of an easy assignment of e-mails to a target folder, e.g., by a simple assignment rule. However, it breaks the relationship of e-mails that belong to a common discussion thread or topic. Other e-mail recipients prefer to file e-mails on the basis of the topic they relate to, such as finances, projects, etc. However, there are often e-mails that do not relate to a topic, or relate to a rarely-used topic. Some other people prefer to file their e-mail according to a mixed approach of the e-mail sender and the topics to which the e-mails pertain. This can work fairly well when the e-mail recipients file their own e-mail, but the system can break down if the e-mail recipient allows another, such as an assistant, to file their e-mails. Furthermore, even after the target folder is determined, it can take a considerable period of time to navigate to the target folder by possibly traversing through a hierarchy of folders and subfolders and, then, moving the e-mail to that final destination.
There have been some attempts to automate the filing of e-mails in their proper folder. In one approach, a set of fixed rules is used to automatically sort incoming e-mail into an appropriate folder. This method has the disadvantage, however, of bypassing the e-mail recipient's Inbox, and, therefore, the e-mail recipient may never see the e-mail.
Another approach is to allow the e-mail recipient a shortcut to the last used folder. This is implemented in both Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Outlook® e-mail systems. That is, the Macintosh and Microsoft Outlook® e-mail systems permit an e-mail recipient to quickly move a current e-mail into last used folder. While this can be a handy feature if filing a number of e-mails into the same folder is desired, it is of limited general applicability.
Yet another approach eliminates the filing of e-mail entirely. For example, Gmail, the e-mail system provided by Google®, does not use a folder system to file e-mails but, rather, uses a Google search to find the message that a recipient wants. Furthermore, Gmail keeps each message grouped with all of its replies and displayed as a conversation to facilitate the location of a related string of e-mails.
While search systems such as those used by Gmail may reduce the need for the filing of e-mails, they suffer from limitations including the fact that an e-mail may not be found if the correct keyword is not searched. For this and other reasons, most users would prefer to have the ability to file their e-mail in folders, even if they also had powerful search algorithms for searching through the e-mail database by keywords.